The Labour Party (LP) crisis has entered a new phase of bitter recriminations after two rival factions issued contradictory statements following Federal High Court rulings that dismissed cases filed by both sides.
As the saying goes, when two elephants fight dirty, the grass suffers. Candidates who emerged under unclear leadership positions of the party have missed the opportunity to campaign ahead of the August 16 bye-election in 12 states, and votes cast for them may not count.
On one side, the Abure-led faction insisted that the court’s decision did not invalidate its leadership, accusing Senator Nenadi Usman and her ‘renegades’ of celebrating prematurely.
National Publicity Secretary, Obiora Ifoh, maintained that the courts merely declined jurisdiction and reaffirmed that leadership issues remained the party’s internal affair.
He accused Usman’s camp of ‘misleading the public’ and warned that those celebrating were ‘playing into the hands of the opposition’.
The faction further alleged a plot between the Professor Yakubu Mahmood-led Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and ‘renegades’ to weaken the Labour Party, insisting that the electoral commission was under a subsisting Nasarawa High Court order of 23 July directing it to recognise Abure and Umar Farouk Ibrahim as the authentic leaders.
But Senator Nenadi Usman, who declared herself Interim National Chairman after a factional National Executive Council (NEC) meeting at a hotel in Abuja a few weeks ago, welcomed the judgment as a decisive victory against Abure.
In her statement, she argued that the Federal High Court’s dismissal of Abure’s suit ‘aligned squarely’ with the Supreme Court’s 4 April decision which, in her interpretation, had nullified recognition of Abure’s leadership.
She praised INEC for affirming in its affidavit that Abure’s tenure expired in June 2024 and that the controversial March 2024 Nnewi convention was never recognised.
Caught in the middle is INEC, which has consistently maintained in court that it neither recognises Abure nor monitored his convention.
Yet the Commission has not formally declared recognition for Usman either.
In effect, the Labour Party is locked in limbo at the very moment it ought to be mobilising massively for a crucial by-election.
The confusion has real-time consequences. Reports from polling units in the ongoing by-election across the 12 states suggested that some voters still cast their ballots for the Labour Party, apparently unaware of the dispute or hopeful it would be resolved in record time.
With INEC’s non-recognition of any factional leadership, the validity of such votes is uncertain and may spark further litigation as seen in recent times.
Analysts warned that the party risks disenfranchising its supporters and weakening its bargaining power ahead of 2027.
A Kaduna-based political scientist who spoke in confidence put it this way: ‘This is a textbook case of a party imploding under the weight of internal division. ‘While the factions trade accusations, their voters are left stranded, and the opposition stands to gain the most. As you can see in this polling unit here at Angwan Baro Polling Units 31 and 32, apart from poor voter turnout, people are not discussing the Labour Party.
‘These two polling units with over 3,000 voting rights voted massively for the Labour Party in 2023. But today, the voters are confused’, he said.
A chieftain of the party and coordinator of Obidient Movement in Kaduna, Elder Yusuf Danbaki, said regrettably that since INEC had yet to recognise any leader for the party, the primary earlier conducted by the Abure team was a waste of time, energy and resources.
According to him, the statutory members of the party have begun a process that hopefully would allow INEC to add Nenadi as the authentic leader of the party ahead of the party congresses and convention, which will throw up the eventual substantive party leaders.
To him, the innocent supporters of the party who cast their vote for the party on Saturday, May have wasted their votes because the process that led to that voting was faulty, thereby not producing any good outcome.
As of 8 p.m. Friday, 15 August, INEC has maintained its stance of non-interference in the ongoing leadership tussle within the party, stressing that the matter was before the courts.
The Chief Press Secretary to the INEC Chairman, Mr Rotimi Oyekanmi, confirmed that the commission currently does not recognise any individual as the national chairman or leader of the Labour Party, pending the outcome of the court process.
‘When a matter is in court, the best thing is not to comment, because any remark could be considered subjudice’, he stated.
On election procedures, he explained that result from polling units would be uploaded to the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV) as soon as voting and collation are completed.
With about 10 months to the party primaries ahead of the 2027 round of elections, many are of the view that the Labour Party may have overcome its leadership struggles to put it as one of the opposition parties to look forward to. Indeed, interesting days are ahead as Nigeria democracy grows older.
